Monday 14th March 2011

Getting big is a great problem, but rapid and unexpected growth can be filled with peril – both from a technology perspective and ability to continue delivering on your company’s core promise to consumers. Join industry veterans that have experienced this dilemma as they share lessons on how to limit unpredictability in today’s connected social world of the cloud, Web, and multiple devices. From starting small in your kitchen and growing to support thousands of users to running a business whose data stores jump from gigabytes to terabytes; or coming up with the next big thing that established behemoths want to mimic—if they can’t buy you first. Hear how firms like Graphic.ly, Redbox, Dodgeball, and Mediabank survive and thrive as they manage growth.

Faced with the costs of vertically scaling their relational database systems, developers are increasingly turning to Apache Cassandra as an alternative. Cassandra solves the scaling problem by partitioning data, expanding horizontally and promising replication consistency. Effectively utilizing Cassandra requires that developers take different approaches to the ways they model data used in their applications. This presentation will explain how Cassandra achieves scale and reliability, and give an example of porting a SQL schema to Cassandra.